Mickadeit: An uplifting immigrants' memoir

It’s impossible to pick my favorite scene from Bang Van Pham’s memoir, but right up there is this one: She goes into labor in a movie theater in Saigon while watching “Dr Zhivago” with her husband and a Buddhist monk. While her husband rushes to get the car, the monk agrees to wait with her – but not without trepidation.

“If I were seen with a pregnant woman in front of theater it would be disastrous!” he says.

Van Pham laughs – momentarily forgetting her pain, the war raging in the countryside and her husband’s ever-present responsibilities as a member of the South Vietnam’s congress.

On Monday night, I met the girl, Tita, who was born that fall day in 1971. She and her two brothers, Martin and Andy, were at the Westin South Coast Plaza for the retirement dinner of her father, Superior Court Judge John Nho Nguyen, the first Vietnamese-American judge in Southern California.

Bang was there, too, of course, and she had placed at every seat a copy “Love Faith Hope – A Journey of a Vietnamese American Woman in War and Peace.” The book just become available on Amazon.

Like “Dr Zhivago,” Nho’s and Bang’s story is that of lovers caught up in a civil war. “It’s a difficult story to read,” Justice William Rylaarsdam said, “but one thing overshadows everything – it’s a love story.” Beautifully crafted, I will add, by Bang, an English teacher in Vietnam.

It opens with their traditional wedding procession. Bang is wearing garments made from fabric Nho had picked out for her during one of his many business trips. “La vie en rose. His love for me was bright and clear like the pink brocade; fervent and deep like the burgundy.”

It’s a story of enduring love, certainly. What makes it extraordinary is the backdrop in which it begins: Vietnam, 1971. At the outset it reminds us that even as the war raged, in some parts of Vietnam normal life tried to go on.

After the wedding scene, Bang backs up and relates their tale more or less chronologically, beginning in 1967 when they meet and she volunteers for his campaign. The enemy attacks Saigon during Tet in 1968, and their love blooms as Nho works to provide aid for his displaced constituents.

Bang takes us through Nho’s years as a young politician, and we see her helping him in ways that would be familiar to any American political wife (courting volunteers) and in ways that would shock (killing dozens of chickens each day to feed the volunteers).

We know the fall of Saigon is coming, so it is heartbreaking to see Nho and Bang hoping otherwise – adding two more children and starting a small sweet potato farm on an arid parcel. Bang carries a pistol to protect herself from the Viet Cong while she works the plot alone.

Nho having racked up significant campaign debt, they must live with his family – four generations, 18 people, under one roof. They try their hands at selling rice and raising fish. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll get a foothold, the American and South Vietnamese armies will drive out the communists, and they’ll have the life they dreamed of.

But we know that can’t happen. Finally, in April of 1975, an Australian diplomat invites the couple over for dinner and tells them, “The communists have won. It’s over.” Nho’s inclination is to start a guerrilla action, but the idea is rejected. The allied embassies evacuate as the communists close in on the city. Nho tries to keep his homeland from falling while getting his family out.

This is where it becomes the quintessential American immigrant story. They become refugees at Camp Pendleton with virtually nothing. The political juice they had in Vietnam is worthless, but they have the lessons from three decades of a hard-scrabble life.

They dive into the ways of immigrants – using the bus to get around, taking seamstress jobs, going to night school, making new connections. How did Nho and Bang go from that to Monday night’s dinner in which a roomful of judges and a who’s who of the county bar fete them and their children – children who turned out to be a doctor and two lawyers?

It wasn’t the life they dreamed of in Vietnam when they were holding hands in a rice field, hiding from Bang’s mother’s disapproving eyes. But I came away believing it has been a richer one. That this family has lived rather quietly and humbly among us all these years makes the reading seem all the more special.

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